Forget about the fun being had today on April Fools' Day with openSUSE / Gentoo / Arch / Debian supposedly merging to form the Centerbury Linux distribution, GNOME 3.0 being delayed until September, or hypothetical Linux disasters as there is actually some serious and important news: Marek Olšák has published his patch-set he wishes to push into Mesa master for OpenGL 3.0 floating-point textures and render-buffers support. He's pushing for this legally-iffy code to go into the mainline Mesa code-base but to block it by an opt-in --enable-texture-float build flag.

Rather than doing any April Fools' Jokes around here (the GNOME project is claiming GNOME 3.0 has been delayed to September), yesterday and today we're looking at a few different headlines that would cause great impact for Linux. Yesterday was looking at what announcements would greatly benefit Linux along with the community's response, but today we're looking at what would cause great harm and be disastrous to Linux and open-source software.

There's already been some to think that Postal III being pushed back and its unknown Linux fate being some early April Fools' Day joke, but unfortunately that's not the case. You won't find any April Fools' news items on Phoronix, but if there were some "crazy" Linux announcements, what would they be?

While the Mesa / Gallium3D graphics drivers on Linux leave a lot to be desired, in terms of features, supporting the latest OpenGL specifications, and performance compared to the multi-platform proprietary Linux and Windows drivers from NVIDIA and AMD, the Mac drivers aren't too much better.

Miguel de Icaza, David Reveman, and their Novell team working on Mono/Moonlight began working on GPU acceleration support. This initial GPU acceleration support was largely focused on accelerating 3D transforms of objects -- just not videos, but all of the Silverlight content -- and other surfaces. They also landed a new rendering pipeline and other work. Pushed into Moonlight's Git repository today is more GPU acceleration work, but this time focusing upon optimizing Moonlight's engine for video rendering operations.

In November of last year we talked about an HTML5 back-end to GTK+ that allowed any GTK application to be then run from the web-browser. This work was not merged into GTK+ 3.0, but other work was, such as for supporting multiple GTK+ back-ends. Now though this HTML5 work is in a position to land with GTK+ 3.2.

Following the announcement less than a month ago that Nokia and Microsoft were hooking up over Windows Phone 7 and that Qt and MeeGo would take a back-seat at Nokia, it's being announced this morning that the Qt commercial licensing business has been sold. The purchaser of the Qt commercial side is Digia.

BSD users can be excited this week not only for the release of FreeBSD 8.2, but their open-source graphics stack is finally beginning to catch-up with Linux too. Kernel mode-setting is finally becoming a reality with the FreeBSD kernel and with that support for the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) memory management under BSD and updating the Intel DRI graphics driver.

While Nokia has effectively abandoned the MeeGo Linux operating system, Intel is still supporting MeeGo along with AMD and other vendors, including SplashTop. SplashTop has today announced the release of their MeeGo-based operating system.

Yesterday's announcement of Microsoft and Nokia hooking up over Windows Phone 7 on Nokia's smart-phone has rattled the free software / Linux communities. There's more than 100 comments in our forums about this announcement and this isn't the only tech community where there are outraged customers and other parties disappointed in Nokia's decision. In particular, many are upset because with Nokia's decision it basically pushes the MeeGo Linux operating system and the Qt tool-kit to the back-seat.

As many were expecting, Nokia and Microsoft this morning announced a strategic partnership under which Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 will become Nokia's primary smart-phone platform. With this move, it really darkens the outlook for the MeeGo Linux platform. Additionally, on Nokia's Windows Phone 7 implementation, their Qt tool-kit will not be available.

ALSA 1.0.23 was released in April 2010 as a major update to the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, but it's finally been outdone by ALSA 1.0.24. The ALSA 1.0.24 update is also very significant and delivers on quite a number of sound card / audio processor driver improvements.